There is a particular kind of loneliness that can happen at work even when your calendar is full. You are in the meetings. You are in the Slack threads. You are responding to the documents, the decisions, and the little red notification dots that seem to multiply when no one is looking. And yet, when the actual moment arrives — the hard conversation with your manager, the feedback you don't know how to give, the career question you don't know how to ask — you can still feel strangely alone.

Anton Repponen via Harvard Business Review

So when my friend and executive coach, Caru Jones, sent me this Harvard Business Review article, suggesting AI is making us lonelier at work, I understood the concern. It might, if we use it to replace every small act of reaching toward another person. We could very easily build a world where no one has to ask for help, admit confusion, sense-check a decision, or sit in the awkward but necessary space of figuring something out with someone else. In theory, that might be efficient, though it would also make work feel thinner.

But I also don't believe that is the only future available to us. At Blomma, we have been building from a different lens: where AI can become a doorway into the conversations people need to have the most, not an escape hatch from them.

Because often, the hardest part of any necessary conversation is not the conversation itself. It is the before. The walk around the block before you ask for feedback. The three drafts of the message you never send. The moment when you know something feels off, but you do not yet have language for it. The private spiral of wondering whether you are overreacting, being difficult, missing something obvious, or finally noticing something important.

That is where I think AI can be genuinely useful. Not as your manager. Not as your mentor. Not as a synthetic best friend with better response times. But as a place to think before you act. A place to turn the volume down on the noise long enough to hear yourself. A place to practice the sentence before you say it to the person who actually matters.

This is the impact we believe Blomma can have in the workforce. We are building an AI career companion for the moments that usually happen between the formal systems of work: between the annual review and the actual growth, between the promotion and the support you were supposed to get, between the vague advice to "be more strategic" and the very real need to understand what that means on a Wednesday afternoon when you are staring at a blank document.

For too long, structured career support has been treated like something people earn once they are senior enough. Executive coaching, mentorship, reflection, and the space to make sense of complexity are often reserved for the people who have already "made it." But the need starts much earlier. That is the gap Blomma is trying to close. Not by replacing the people around us, but by helping us show up to them with more clarity, more courage, and more self-awareness.

AI will not automatically make work better. It will reflect the intentions, incentives, and imagination we build into it. So maybe the question is not whether AI is making us more lonely. Maybe the better question is: are we designing AI that helps people avoid one another, or AI that helps people find their way back to the conversations that connect them?

At Blomma, we are betting on the second.

You can try Blomma today at blomma.com and use the code FRIENDS to bypass the waitlist.